Defining love

Signs of Valentine's Day: Cookies, candy, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, red roses -- and a spike in the number of people looking up the word "love" online.

Signs of Valentine's Day: Cookies, candy, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, red roses -- and a spike in the number of people looking up the word "love" online. (Tribune file photo)

Heidi Stevens, Tribune Newspapers

Love is in the air (or at least lining store shelves) this week, as Valentine's Day fast approaches. Which may explain the bump in online look-ups (that's look-ups, not hook-ups), at merriam-webster.com.

"'Love' is almost always in the top 20," says Kory Stamper, associate editor at Merriam Webster. "But starting right before Feb. 14 — and right after — it becomes one of the 10 most popular looked-up words."

We're intrigued by the notion of folks flocking to an online dictionary in search of the meaning of love. Stamper is too.

"The other words that are frequently on the most popular list are clearly being looked up for usage," she says. "Affect and effect. Pragmatic. Ubiquitous. Love is really the only word looked up so frequently that doesn't have a contested usage or a difficult to understand definition."

Well, if that doesn't just set our jaded little hearts all aflutter. We had to hear more.

Words Work: Why are people looking up the definition of love?

Stamper: We have a feature on our website called "seen and heard" where people can comment why they looked up a certain word. One person said, "Because I wasn't sure it existed." Someone else wrote, "Because it's the only thing on my mind right now." You see a lot of people wanting a more poetic meaning or some kind of great wisdom for the ages.

WW: And do they find it?

Stamper: Our definition is fairly bland and lexical. "A strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties." We get a lot of comments like, "That's not what love is! Love is sunshine on a puppy's fur!"

WW: Really? That was someone's definition?

Stamper: Well, I don't know if sunshine on a puppy's fur was. But you get a lot of notes saying, "You don't know what love is, so I'll tell you." One gentleman sent me an alternative definition that was more poetic and insanely long and sort of along the lines of a puppy on a summer's day.

WW: Did you sort of want to track him down and date him?

Stamper: No. I wanted to have a restraining order filed against him.

WW: What are some of your favorite alternate definitions?

Stamper: "The meaning of love is the Jonas Brothers. They are a group of amazing boys." "Love is the feeling that you cannot live without a certain person because they make everything better." "Love: When two life forms use one another for leisure, trust, information, and/or work." The one email I was thinking of can't be printed in its entirety, but the sender says that love is, among other things, "like a butterfly; a sad story for the times to come; like a burning cigarette with a few moments of misery to go; that one way dead end road you knew you'd never leave; one wooden stake through the heart; a poinsettia in poison rain; some sort of peace of mind." He ends by noting that love "was a Warm October night." It was, but it's not any more.

WW: And this activity around the word "love" is year-round? Not just at Valentine's Day?

Stamper: I think people don't realize the dictionary is actually just the meaning of the word. They're looking for the essential nature of the word.